Shame

I remember noticing a poor kid at school.  She was spotty, had greasy hair and her clothes were about a decade behind the fashion.  The only time she ever updated her equipment was when it literally fell apart on her.  I should know, the only time I saw her was when I looked in the mirror in the girl's loos.

Yeah, that spotty, greasy geek was me.  The joys of growing up being a benefits kid.  No matter what you do when you are a benefits kid your differences stand out.  Even then being on benefits came with a heavy does of shame, a thing that seems to be increasing as more and more benefits are reduced or cut all together.

It seems the current Government is good at shame.  Stay at home Mothers who bring their children up themselves instead of leaving up to a child minder are stigmatized, single Mothers even more so.  Disable people only have fifteen minutes visits from their carers, elderly people have to choose between staying warm or having something to eat.

Paul Maynard (Conservative MP) is quoted as saying last week that emergency food parcels shouldn't be given out because people might become reliant on them, stating:

"I value responsibility.  I do not believe that immediate food relief should be the role of the Government."

In other words, "people who are struggling to stay out of debt because they were made redundant in the job cuts we caused should be left to starve because helping them might send the wrong 'message'."

As JK Rowling wrote in 2010,

"Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say 'it's not the money, it's the message'.  When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans and your child is hungry, it is the money."

Yeah, she is now one of the riches people in the UK (though not as rich as she once was, she dropped out of Forbes' billionaires list because she pays her taxes and has given away an estimated $160m to charity) but JK Rowling once was an immigrant, a single mother and a benefit claimant.  She knows how tough it can be when you are living on the bread line.

There isn't anything noble about going hungry.  There isn't anything uplifting in having to choice between feeding yourself or feeding your children.  And there certainly isn't anything character building in being abused at school because you're "the brat of a thief who takes the public's money and hides it by calling it benefits" as one of my younger sister's classmates said when they were in Year Four.

This seems to be genuinely surprising to the current Government and though people like to try to forget this, the previous Government as well (believe me I should know, I was there, remember?).

It seems that governments believe that poverty is caused by personal failing and not the failing of the Government to provide us with stable, sustainable jobs and the using benefits is the result of a lack of personal responsibility rather than doing what you need to make ends meet, just.

Responsibility?  Does the Government actually know what that word means because right now we seem to be using different dictionaries.  It lets children get poorer, to the point that one in five children are now considered to be in poverty and blames "workless" parents for this 'crime'.  Well if you'd provide us with jobs that we could do then we'd darn well do them!

It's about time that made/produced/grown in Britain actually had some pride to go with that label.  Stop taxing every single company that tries it's best to keep it's work force in Britain to its knees, give them a tax break to encourage them to take on even more British workers and then tax the ones that send their work force over seas.  We could still have industry is the Government wasn't so keen on strangling it with taxes.

Poverty causes shame, it's just it's coming down on the wrong side of the scales right now.